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Chapter Three the Transformations of Human Rights of Mobility in Our Global Age: Jamaica Kincaid’S a Small Place and Stephanie Black’S Life and Debt

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Chapter Three the Transformations of Human Rights of Mobility in Our Global Age: Jamaica Kincaid’S a Small Place and Stephanie Black’S Life and Debt Chang 66 Chapter Three The Transformations of Human Rights of Mobility in Our Global Age: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt Chapter Three aims to discuss global mass tourism, another form of global mobility, and its impacts on human rights represented in two works: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt . Global mass tourism is the most representative activity of globalization. Global tourism is not simply an international commercial activity, it is also practiced as one form of human right of mobility, which is defined in the Universal Declaration and allows people to freely and legally leave and go to another place or country. I choose to juxtapose these two texts about global tourism because Black uses part of Kincaid’s work in her film. Analyzing these two texts, I try to reveal the more complicated global capital distribution in process behind global tourism. This chapter indicates the tendencies of human rights in the global age and examines their impacts on marginalized area and the hope both texts provide. A Small Place and Life and Debt represent global tourism and its impacts on local people’s life. A Small Place is an essay written by Jamaica Kincaid in 2001, focusing on the development in Antigua from its colonial past to the globalization era. The narrator identifies with an Antiguan who angrily accuses the global tourism, colonial domination, and the corruption of the Antiguan government. Life and Debt , an unorthodox documentary film shot from 1991 to 2001 by Stephanie Black, records the serious impacts of IMF (The International Monetary Fund) and globalization on Chang 67 Jamaica, the popular tourist island. 1 Confronting the highly penetrating and disembodied influences of globalization, Black aims to make visible these influences through the practice of everyday life of Jamaican people who are supposed to benefit from globalization. 2 This film reveals many specific and material forms and effects of globalization, such as international companies, tourism, governmental institutions and the financial oppression they cause. Identifying first with the eyes of a tourist, this film endeavors to create a concrete space to accuse globalization of its false promise by adapting part of Kincaid’s essay for its voiceover. I take the Caribbean countries represented in two texts as a site that helps to examine the right of mobility in global tourism because Caribbean area is severely struggling in economic globalization. Struggling between the exploitation of economic globalization and colonial relics, the Caribbean countries almost hardly have any opportunity to prosper and compete economically with other countries. Unlike other countries that were colonized by UK, such as India and South Africa, the Caribbean countries can survive by mainly developing global tourism. 3 Different from a lot of commentators who use economic or colonial perspectives to understand these two texts, this chapter analyzes these two 1 Stephanie Black is an American white female director. Her major in college was environmental science but she never finished her study before she started her career as a director. H2Worker is her first famous film about the Caribbean men as the guestworkers in American sugar corporations. This film won both Best Documentary and Best Cinematography at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. She has other works, such as Incident at Oglala , Making of Chant Down Babylon , and More Than Luck . She spends most of her career life on speaking for the weak and minority. 2 The film, in the beginning, quotes the statements of Director of IMF (at that time), Horst Kohler, who declares that globalization works for the benefit for all people, especially the poor because, as he says, “there is no good future for the rich if there is no better future for the poor.” 3 “South Africa is a world leader in mining.” The country holds the world’s largest reserves of gold and platinum. Diamond industry also contributes a lot to the national economic growth. As for India, it is “a major exporter of highly-skilled workers in software and financial services.” According to Wikipedia, “India is the second fastest growing major economy in the world…at the end of the first quarter of 2006-2007.” Both countries have different advantages to be certain leading characters in global economy. http://www.southafrica.info/doing_business/economy/key_sectors/mining.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India Chang 68 representations with the discourses of human rights. For example, John Rapley explains how Life and Debt criticizes the false economic promise of the supra-national financial agencies for educating the first-world audience who rarely suffer from economic globalization. 4 Chris Dashiell connects the supra-national organizations like The World Bank and IMF in the film with the colonial era and shows that global economic control nowadays is exactly another version of modern slavery. 5 As for A Small Place , Vanessa Puoello explains that how Kincaid relates today’s governmental corruption with its colonial past. 6 Rhonda D. Frederick argues that Kincaid clarifies the similarity between the tourists and colonizers and the process that colonizers become tourists. This chapter examines these two representations of globalization with a different aspect—the human rights of mobility. I argue that these two texts capture the capitalization of the right of mobility as a contemporary globalization phenomenon by representing the severely exploited Antigua and Jamaica. The phenomenon of being capitalized shows that human rights, which are concepts based on equality, turn to be a hierarchical power or capital that can be monopolized and allotted. By capitalization of the right of mobility, I mean, on the one hand, the mobility which is declared as a universal right for every human being can start to be accumulated according to the capital one has in hand. On the other hand, the right of mobility which is a human right and takes human bodies to perform begins to be “de-bodied.” The right of mobility belongs no longer only to human beings but also to economic agents, that is, corporations. They are capital 4 For more information, please see http://www.jaimaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20010823/cleisure/cleisure3.html 5 For more information, please see http://www.cinescene.com/dash/life&debt.htm 6 Please see http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Kincaid.html Chang 69 holders and groups of people authorized to act as individuals without being physical present. They are able to claim rights as individuals in the global age. In both representations, the characteristics of accumulability and de-bodiness are the contemporary transformations of the right of mobility in globalization. The paper is divided into four major parts. The first part deals with the colonial background of Antigua and Jamaica represented in the texts. The colonial history is not only the predecessor of global exploitation toward the Caribbean countries but also the consequence caused by the global mobility of the colonizers. The second section discusses the global polarization of the right of mobility. Part three focuses on the de-body phenomenon of human rights in two representations. The fourth part points out the hope two representations express. I. Colonial History To understand both representations and the intertextuality in Life and Debt , one must realize the similar historical context of Antigua and Jamaica located in Caribbean Ocean. 7 Having Siboney and Arawaks as its aborigines, Antigua was first discovered by Columbus in 1493. In 1632, English monarch started to rule until 1967. Under British dominance, Antigua turned to be a sugar-producing island. Numerous slaves were imported from Africa since British settlement. The slavery was finally abolished in 1838. During the middle of 20 th century, Antigua gradually developed its status of Associated Statehood. It was granted full independence in 1981. Today, it mainly depends on tourism as the national principal income. Jamaica’s history is 7 The following information about two countries’ history can be found in the websites: http://www.wiol.com/antigua/history.html and http://www.iexplore.com/damp/Jamaica/History Chang 70 similar with Antigua’s. Arawks inhabited the island before Columbus arrived in 1494. A few years later, it was colonized by Spain until 1655. British became the new colonizer and turned Jamaica into one British Caribbean slavery colony since 1517. In 1834, slavery was abolished. During 1930s to 1940s, Jamaica started to self-rule and became independent in 1962. Besides selling drugs and training dogs, global tourism has been the major source of foreign exchange. Undergoing the similar colonial past, Antigua and Jamaica is to some extent unified metaphorically in their history. Their historical experience would refer to each other’s past. They do not “constitute a common origin” of identity or history, but their similar past makes them “a translation” among their cultures and identities (Stuart Hall 236). The translatability between the two texts represents a fuller picture of colonizers from different perspectives; one is from the local’s and the other is from a tourist’s viewpoint. Although with different perspectives, A Small Place and Life and Debt share one common observation of the colonial history; that is, the hyper-mobility of the colonizer. In A Small Place , all the miseries that Antiguans must passively accept start with the moment of colonization which, according to the narrator, originates from some British people who would not like to stay home. You [the British] murdered people. You imprisoned people…There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home. (35) Those who stay in England remain good people, while those who appear in Antigua are “un-Christian-like,” “pigs,” and “criminal” (27-31).
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